Aristocracy

THE ADAMS FAMILY--James Truslow Adams--Little, Brown ($4).

Says Author James Truslow Adams of the Adams family, "with which I am in no way connected.": It is the most distinguished in the U. S. It has a unique record of public service. The Adams Family, June choice of the Literary Guild, is an attempt to describe this phenomenon, but not explain it. Something happened to the Adams blood or brain 150 years ago, lifted them from obscure respectability to international fame. Ever since, they have "maintained a pre-eminent position, due neither to great wealth nor to a hereditary title, but to character and sheer intellectual ability."

The Adamses came to Massachusetts from England about 1636, for more than 100 years were good but unremarkable citizens. Then John Adams was born. Educated for the ministry, he became a lawyer, was soon outstanding among public men in Massachusetts. A patriot, like his distant cousin Sam Adams, he was one of Massachusetts' delegates to the first Continental Congress. He nominated Washington as Commander-in-Chief. He was sent to France as Commissioner, later to England as Minister. U. S. Vice President eight years, he succeeded Washington as President, was first occupant of the White House. When Thomas Jefferson was elected to succeed him, Adams was so enraged that he refused to be present at Jefferson's inauguration. (Only other such case: son John Quincy Adams, fifth U. S. President, would not stay to greet incoming President Andrew Jackson.) Quick-tempered, ambitious, vain, John Adams was never personally popular. Short and fat, he was nicknamed "His Rotundity" by Washington wits.

Says Author Adams: "No Adams has ever been a party man." When statesmen came out and politicians came in, the Adamses were gradually forced further and further out of .public life. John Quincy, Minister to The Hague at 27, was second and last of the Adamses to reach the White House. After his single Presidential term he was elected to the House of Representatives, served there long and well, died in harness. Charles Francis, in the third generation, was Minister to England during the anxious times of the Civil War.

All the Adamses wrote voluminously, but not till the fourth generation found writing the only public career left open to them. Henry Adams wanted to influence politics by his pen. He found it an endless, hopeless task. His most famed book, The Education of Henry Adams, was published posthumously (1918). Long out of_political power, the Adamses are still in the public eye. "Today a third Charles Francis, the son of John Quincy's grandson John Quincy, is head of the family. A Harvard graduate, like all of his family since John; for 30 years treasurer of the University; a lawyer like all of his family; a famous yachtsman who defended the American Cup against the British; a man true to the family tradition and honored in his community,, he sits in the Cabinet at Washington as Secretary of that Navy which was founded by John"

The Author. James Truslow Adams. 52, born in Brooklyn, now living in Manhattan, has written so ably of New England that he is often thought to be a New Englander. Educated abroad, at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, at Yale, he became partner in a Manhattan Stock Exchange firm, retired in 1912 to study history. During the War he served as captain, was detailed to special duty at the Versailles Peace Conference. Other books: The Founding of New England (Pulitzer Prize, 1921), Revolutionary New England, New England in the Republic.

Caustic

LAMENTS FOR THE LIVING--Dorothy Parker--Viking ($2.50).

Author Parker has a way with her; her way is caustic, penetrating, deflating. Her sarcasm, often restrained, is always present, usually evident. Laments for the Living is a collection of 13 short stories, dialogs, monologs in her best, most caustic manner.

Bitter at her best, Dorothy Parker can also be funny. You Were Perfectly Fine is a dialog between a man with a hangover and a girl who tells him what he did last night. Each revelation bends him a little further. The Sexes, also a dialog, pictures the love-life of a "sheik," a flapper. The Mantle of Whistler is a dialog between a girl and a man, just introduced, both of whom have a reputation for wisecracking to keep up. Nothing but a succession of thin-worn comebacks; it gives the impression of being itself a wisecrack about wisecracking.

Author Parker is more entertaining when she is funny, but more herself in graver or more spiteful key. Mr. Durant is the story of a man who got into trouble with his stenographer, out of it with the help of what he doubtless imagines is providence. Little Curtis is a small, indeterminate but pathetic boy who has had the misfortune to be adopted by the very respectable first lady of a very small town. Best story: Big Blonde, which won first prize in the O. Henry Memorial award (1929). It is the story of a good-natured woman who takes to drink when her paunchy lovers grow tired of her.

The Author. Dorothy Rothschild Parker, youngish (age 36), chic, attractive, has become one of the best-known women writers in the U. S. Onetime steady contributor to Life, Judge, she was recently in Hollywood, writing scenarios. Last week she was asea, enroute for her Switzerland home. Famed is her conversation among friends for its bite, epigrams (sometimes unprintable). Her best witticisms are private. Lately in England she wrote that she had been at a luncheon party "at which all five sexes were represented." She is divorced. Other books: Enough Rope, Sunset Gun.

Punster's Whimsy

PARLOR, BEDLAM & BATH--S. J. Perelman & Q. J. Reynolds--Liveright ($2).

Sidney J. Perelman is Judge's able artist-author of many a crazy drawing, crazy patter. His form of humor: to satirize the commonplace by exaggerating it. His puns are so startling they are often funny; his patchwork of hackneyed phrases so unexpected and alliterative it often shocks you into laughter. Alliterative, too, are his illustrations. With Quentin J. Reynolds of the New York Evening World he has written a lively, whimsical, improbable but satirical yarn in which his hand is evident but not quite evident enough. The chapter-headings, take-offs on an old tradition, are obviously Perelman-propounded. Example: "The foundling on the priory steps--In which an ankle is sprained and a question asked--A pitcher is sent to the well and traded to the Braves--The long arm of coincidence rears its ugly head and in its hand is a hammer --An inkling about the foundling."

Hero Chester Tattersall, unremarkable employe of a Manhattan telephone company suddenly finds himself rich through the demise of Uncle Marmaduke, surveying instrument tycoon. His first action is to take a "gyp" taxi (one charging more than the minimum fare) for a long ride. Then he rents an oversized apartment and proceeds to enjoy his life. The record of his adventures makes lively if not edifying reading, contains many a pungently satirical comment on U. S. urban and suburban life. Sometimes Authors Perelman and Reynolds call a spade by its trade name. Says a Manhattan newspaperman, complaining as is the custom of newspapermen: "Some business. Work for the Telegram, there's a paper. When you're fifty-five and you've been there twenty years, they give you a week's pay. Bye-bye, little boy, another guy hobbling on a cane in the State institution. Or work for the Sun, that gentle old Y. M. C. A. Smoke a cigaret in the city room and you'll be sleeping on a park bench the same night. Or work for the Post, with the Great White Father of the Curtis publications spying on you from Philadelphia. Oh yes, Mr. Lorimer. Oh no, Mr. Lorimer. Or work for the Brooklyn papers, like the Eagle. They raise you till you get seventy-five a week and then fire you. They'll hire you back the next day for forty. Or work for Mr. Hearst, he pays the best. Sure he does, until some mug blows in from Chicago who's a friend of the efficiency boys. I tell you, anybody who goes into this racket is crazy."

Malay Utopia

THE LAST PARADISE--Hickman Powell--Cape & Smith ($4).

The island of Bali, just east of Java, due south of Borneo, is owned by Holland but enjoys a rare domestic independence. The Dutch policy is Bali for the Balinese. With an extremely fertile soil, Bali raises and exports pigs, cattle, copra, coffee. Says Author Powell: the Balinese are furthermore the most artistic race in the world.

"There is in the language of Bali no word for art. There is no word for artist. A man is a stone carver, a wood carver, a painter, a goldsmith; that his work will be a striving for the beautiful is taken for granted. But charming though it be, Bali is no saccharine Utopia, monotonous with felicity. As in other tropic countries, milk and honey come in cans. There women grow old and shrink to hideous phantoms of themselves."

The book is illustrated with photographs by Andre Roosevelt, whom Mr. Powell, newspapermen, chummed with on Bali, drawings by Alexander King.

Exciting Case

NIGHT NURSE--Dora Macy--Brentano ($2).

Dora Macy [her real name is suppressed by the publishers], author of Ex-Mistress, says she met the heroine narrator of this tale in a hospital, heard her story, ghosted it for her. Readers will learn few sensational facts about the medical profession. They will, however, find this book a frank thriller, with villainy and heroics in high relief, easy to read, hard to enthuse over.

Lora Hart, the night nurse, takes a queer case: two little girls, daughters of a millionaire mother, who are wasting away without apparent cause. She soon discovers that the children are anemic from undernourishment. The mother is almost a dipsomaniac. A paternal uncle, the nurse suspects, is a villain who is scheming to get control of the family fortune, has his sister-in-law under his thumb, has bribed the .doctor to let the children die. Nurse Hart, with the help of her bootlegger swain, circumvents the plot, rescues the family at the cost of her professional reputation. Night Nurse has evidently been written by one familiar with nursing practice. It digresses long enough to give a detailed version of a nurse's training. The book is also notable in having as its hero a bootlegger, a mighty nice fellow.

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